The republication of a 1972 Soviet polemic against Leon Trotsky and the Fourth International provides an opportunity to reconsider the political function of anti-Trotskyism within Stalinist ideology and the historical fate of the bureaucracy that produced it. Mikhail Basmanov’s Contemporary Trotskyism: Its Anti-Revolutionary Nature was not simply an academic assessment of a rival political tendency. It was part of a broader campaign in which the Soviet bureaucracy sought to discredit Trotskyism and suppress the historical significance of the Left Opposition’s struggle against Stalinism. The persistence of such polemics decades after Trotsky’s assassination showed the bureaucracy’s continued sensitivity to a Marxist critique that challenged its claim to represent the political continuity of the October Revolution.
The subsequent dissolution of the Soviet Union gives these arguments an additional historical significance. The bureaucracy that proclaimed Trotskyism politically bankrupt ultimately presided over the destruction of the USSR and the restoration of capitalism. Basmanov’s work should therefore be read today primarily as a document of Stalinist political ideology, revealing how the Soviet apparatus sought to answer an opposition whose analysis of bureaucracy, nationalism and the danger of capitalist restoration raised questions that official Soviet historiography could never satisfactorily resolve.
Who was Mikhail Basmanov?
Biographical information on Basmanov is surprisingly scarce in readily available sources. We can establish with greater certainty his political and literary role in the Soviet ideological apparatus. He was a specialist writer on Trotskyism, and his best-known work, Contemporary Trotskyism: Its Anti-Revolutionary Nature, was published in English by Moscow’s Progress Publishers in 1972 under the auspices of the CPSU Central Committee’s Institute of Marxism-Leninism.
The circumstances of the book’s production are particularly revealing. The publisher of the new edition describes Basmanov as a “professional in the genre” of Soviet anti-Trotskyist literature and connects the book with a 1971 directive by CPSU Central Committee Secretary Ponomarev calling for an ideological offensive against Trotskyism. Contemporary Trotskyism therefore cannot be approached simply as an academic historian’s independent scholarship. Its original title page explicitly identifies the Institute of Marxism-Leninism of the CC CPSU, while its chapters attack Trotsky, permanent revolution, the Fourth International and contemporary Trotskyist organisations from the standpoint of official Soviet ideology.
David North and the Stalinist falsification of Trotskyism
Basmanov’s Contemporary Trotskyism becomes clearer when placed within the broader tradition of historical falsification examined by David North. North’s defence of Trotsky has repeatedly insisted that attacks upon Trotsky cannot be separated from the political struggle over the historical meaning of the October Revolution, the rise of Stalinism and the fate of the Soviet Union. His In Defence of Leon Trotsky, for example, challenges what he regards as the transmission of Stalinist distortions into contemporary historical writing. The WSWS presentation of the Russian edition described the book as a refutation of attacks by British historians upon Trotsky’s political and intellectual legacy and explicitly connected these controversies with the earlier Stalinist falsification of Soviet history. [wsws.org]
This provides an important framework within which to read Basmanov. The essential issue is not whether we can dismiss every factual assertion in Contemporary Trotskyism because its author wrote within the official Soviet ideological apparatus. The more profound question concerns the political method by which Trotskyism is defined. Rather than beginning with Trotsky’s programme and historical writings and examining their relationship to the major experiences of the twentieth-century working class, the Stalinist polemical tradition began by identifying the Soviet bureaucracy with socialism. Opposition to that bureaucracy could consequently be represented as opposition to the Soviet Union and, ultimately, as counter-revolution.
North’s writings approach the question from the opposite standpoint. In a 2024 speech commemorating Trotsky’s exile on Büyükada, he situated Trotsky’s historical importance particularly in relation to the defeat of the German working class, the rise of Nazism and Stalinist betrayals in Germany, France and Spain. He argued that understanding these historical defeats remains necessary to confronting contemporary political problems. This emphasis on historical experience exposes the fundamental weakness of Basmanov’s method. Trotskyism must be judged not by the denunciatory vocabulary of official Soviet ideology but by examining the policies for which Trotsky and his opponents actually fought. [wsws.org]
The contrast became still more important after 1991. The bureaucracy that had declared Trotskyism historically bankrupt presided over the Soviet Union’s final crisis and dissolution. The WSWS account of the Russian publication of In Defence of Leon Trotsky explicitly links the Soviet Union’s fate to the historical struggle between Trotsky, the Left Opposition, and Stalinism, arguing that contemporary political questions in Russia cannot be understood apart from that history. Whatever judgement one ultimately reaches about North’s political conclusions, this is a question that any retrospective defence of the official Soviet attack on Trotskyism must answer. [wsws.org]
In this context, republishing Mikhail Basmanov’s Contemporary Trotskyism: Its Anti-Revolutionary Nature offers more than antiquarian interest. The Soviet attack on Trotsky did not disappear with the state apparatus that produced it. Stalinist distortions of Trotsky and the Russian Revolution continued to find expression long after the USSR’s dissolution. Basmanov’s book, now republished with a critical introduction by Dmitry Chasovennikov, deserves attention because it preserves, in unusually concentrated form, the political methods the Soviet bureaucracy used to discredit Trotsky, the Left Opposition, and the Fourth International.
The book’s historical provenance is unmistakable. Contemporary Trotskyism appeared in English from Progress Publishers in Moscow in 1972 and carried on its title page the attribution “Institute of Marxism-Leninism of the CC CPSU”. Its chapters announce the political character of the work before the argument has properly begun: “How the Trotskyites Permanently Fought Against the Revolution”, “A Scornful Attitude to the Peasantry”, “The Ideological Collapse of Trotskyism”, and “How the ‘Fourth International’ Was Hammered Together and What Came of It”.
This was not history written from an academic distance. It was political propaganda produced by an official institution of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union against the revolutionary tendency whose leading representatives had been persecuted and physically annihilated by the Stalinist bureaucracy during the preceding decades. The circumstances surrounding its production underline this character. The publisher of the new edition states that, in Kommunist no. 18 of 1971, Boris Ponomarev, secretary of the CPSU Central Committee, called for exposing Trotskyism’s supposed connections with anti-communism and right- and left-wing opportunism. It describes Basmanov’s volume as executing that political directive “at book length”. Contemporary Trotskyism’s interest, therefore, lies far less in what it can tell readers about Trotskyism than in what it reveals about Stalinism.
Why 1972?
The date of publication is essential to understanding the book. Basmanov was writing in the aftermath of a period of enormous international political upheaval. The revolutionary crisis in France in May-June 1968, the struggles surrounding the Prague Spring, mass international opposition to the Vietnam War, and the political radicalisation of a new generation transformed the political atmosphere in Europe and beyond.
Even Basmanov could not simply ignore this process. The opening of his book describes the period as one of profound revolutionary change, specifically citing intensifying class struggle in advanced capitalist countries and the emergence of students and parts of the intelligentsia as active political forces. The new publisher draws attention to an even more revealing feature of the original. Basmanov himself acknowledged that, after supposedly being defeated during the 1920s and 1930s, Trotskyist movements began to revive from the 1950s onward. The publisher argues that the intensity of the Soviet polemic reflected the growth of the Fourth International and other radical tendencies among workers and students after 1968.
This contradiction runs through the whole enterprise. The Soviet bureaucracy insisted that Trotskyism was politically bankrupt, historically discredited and without a significant social base. Yet it continued to devote considerable ideological resources to combating it. The very existence of Contemporary Trotskyism is therefore evidence that the bureaucracy did not regard Trotsky’s political heritage with the indifference appropriate to a genuinely dead tendency.
Basmanov’s subsequent work makes the anxiety still clearer. In 1973 the Novosti Press Agency in Moscow published his Where Are Trotskyites Leading the Youth?, an English-language pamphlet of roughly 100 pages dealing explicitly with Trotskyism, political activity and youth. The title itself tells us something important. The bureaucracy was no longer merely conducting retrospective arguments about disputes from the 1920s. It was concerned with the influence of Trotskyist ideas upon a contemporary younger generation.
The method of the Stalinist school of falsification
The organisational structure of Contemporary Trotskyism displays the characteristic method of official Soviet anti-Trotskyism. Permanent revolution becomes an alleged rejection of the revolutionary capacities of the peasantry. Opposition to the Stalinist programme of socialism in one country becomes disbelief in socialism itself. The Soviet bureaucracy identifies opposition to its diplomatic manoeuvres and political betrayals as hostility to the Soviet Union.
The table of contents demonstrates the procedure particularly clearly. Basmanov moves from supposed Trotskyist hostility to the peasantry to the “rejection” of socialism in one country, the alleged ideological collapse of Trotskyism and finally the claim that contemporary Trotskyism was undermining the anti-imperialist and national liberation movements.
The method is significant. Political disagreements are not analysed according to their actual historical content. Instead, opposition to the policies of the Soviet bureaucracy is progressively identified with opposition to socialism itself. The bureaucratic leadership is thereby transformed from a historically specific political stratum into the personification of socialism, and criticism of the bureaucracy becomes by definition counter-revolutionary. This ideological formula had justified persecuting the Left Opposition long before Basmanov wrote his book.
Consequently, this framework pushed aside the historical questions that might have discredited it. What was the social basis of bureaucratisation in the Soviet Union? Why did Lenin, in the final period of his political life, express increasing alarm over the growth of bureaucratic tendencies? What political meaning did the theory of socialism in one country have, which had never formed part of the Bolshevik Party programme before 1924? What explained the catastrophic policies pursued by the Communist International in Britain, China and Germany? And why did the Soviet leadership undertake the physical extermination of so large a section of the revolutionary generation that had led the October Revolution?
These questions lead directly to writings that official Soviet polemics could not answer through historical investigation alone: Trotsky’s The Third International After Lenin, his writings on Germany and the rise of fascism, and, above all, The Revolution Betrayed.
The fundamental political significance of The Revolution Betrayed lay in Trotsky’s attempt to explain the Soviet Union’s contradictions from a Marxist standpoint. He rejected both the Stalinist identification of the bureaucracy with socialism and the claim that the October Revolution had created another form of capitalism. He instead characterised the Soviet Union as a degenerated workers’ state in which the social gains represented by nationalised property coexisted with a parasitic bureaucratic caste exercising political power. Whether that analysis was correct is a historical and political question requiring serious examination. Basmanov instead begins from the legitimacy of the Soviet bureaucracy and evaluates its opponents accordingly.
The shadow of the Moscow Trials
A deeper historical continuity is involved. Basmanov’s 1972 language was less murderous than that of the Great Terror, but the basic political logic had changed far less than the softer terminology suggested. Trotskyism continued to be presented not as a Marxist tendency whose political analysis might be right or wrong, but as a fundamentally anti-revolutionary phenomenon serving forces hostile to socialism.
That accusation was central to the Stalinist campaign against the Left Opposition. During the Moscow Trials of the 1930s, former leaders of the Bolshevik Revolution were accused of extraordinary conspiracies and subsequently executed. Trotsky, exiled from the Soviet Union, was made the central political defendant in absentia.
The twentieth-century history of Stalinism therefore cannot be separated from the history of anti-Trotskyism. Opposition to Trotsky was not one ideological feature among many. It played an essential role in destroying the political memory of the October Revolution and establishing a new official version of Soviet history in which Stalin’s emergence appeared as the legitimate continuation of Bolshevism.
The contradiction became particularly striking after Nikita Khrushchev denounced parts of Stalin’s record. Once it was conceded that crimes on an enormous scale had been committed, an obvious question followed. What of the political opposition that had fought the bureaucracy before those crimes reached their height? Answering that question required reconsidering the history of the Left Opposition itself.
What Basmanov cannot explain
Basmanov’s book’s decisive weakness follows from its political purpose. To acknowledge Trotskyism as a genuine Marxist opposition to bureaucratic domination would have required reopening the basic political struggles through which the Stalinist regime consolidated itself. This problem extends beyond Trotsky personally. The history of the Fourth International after his assassination posed equally difficult questions for Soviet apologetics.
Particularly important was the 1953 conflict within the Fourth International associated with the tendency headed by Michel Pablo and Ernest Mandel and the formation of the International Committee of the Fourth International. The issue was not simply one more organisational split among left-wing groups. At the centre of the conflict was a debate over the historical role of Stalinism and other bureaucratic and nationalist formations.
For an official Soviet polemicist, treating all these conflicting tendencies as undifferentiated “Trotskyism” was politically convenient. The distinctions disappeared, and with them disappeared the awkward fact that one of the central conflicts within postwar Trotskyism concerned precisely whether revolutionary Marxists should adapt themselves politically to the Stalinist bureaucracies and allied movements.
The homogenisation of politically hostile tendencies therefore performs an ideological function. It lets Basmanov construct “Trotskyism” as a single counter-revolutionary phenomenon rather than examine the historical struggles through which different movements claiming the Trotskyist inheritance evolved.
A surprisingly useful primary source
However, Basmanov’s work contains an irony that the publisher of the new edition itself emphasises. Unlike many polemics in this genre, Contemporary Trotskyism quotes extensively from the publications of the movements it attacks. The publisher calls it unusually well documented for a Soviet source on the post-1968 radical left, noting its references to publications from several countries.
This gives the book a secondary value quite different from the one its author intended. It can be read as evidence of what the Soviet bureaucracy monitored, which tendencies it considered threatening, and how its ideological institutions tried to categorise developments on the international left.
The book is therefore potentially illuminating when approached against the grain. The reader should ask not merely, “What does Basmanov say about the Trotskyists?” but “Why was an institution of the CPSU commissioning and publishing this argument in 1972?” Seen in this way, the polemical excess becomes historical evidence.
History’s verdict
The greatest problem confronting Basmanov’s argument emerged after he published his book. Trotsky insisted that bureaucratic rule did not provide a stable path to socialism. His conception of political revolution stemmed from the contradiction between the nationalised property relations produced by the October Revolution and the bureaucracy’s political domination. In his analysis, defending the social foundations created by October required the Soviet working class to remove the bureaucracy and restore workers’ democracy.
The ultimate fate of the Soviet Union therefore poses a decisive historical question: which analysis more penetratingly captured Soviet society’s contradictions, the bureaucracy’s apologetics or the Marxist opposition to it? The state whose political invincibility was assumed throughout official Soviet literature disappeared in 1991. The CPSU ceased to rule. The Soviet Union was dissolved, and capitalist property relations were restored across the former USSR.
This does not mean that every prediction made by every tendency describing itself as Trotskyist was vindicated. Nor does the collapse of the USSR automatically settle every controversy over Soviet history. But it does require the central claims of official Soviet ideology to be subjected to an accounting that Contemporary Trotskyism, for obvious chronological reasons, could never make. The bureaucratic order Basmanov defended did not provide a stable and irreversible transition to communism. Its political institutions proved incapable of preventing capitalism’s restoration.
This is why Soviet historian Vadim Rogovin’s work matters in any retrospective assessment of Basmanov. In his multi-volume Was There an Alternative?, Rogovin reconstructed the history of the Left Opposition and the struggle against Stalinism as a real political conflict rather than treating the bureaucracy’s ascendancy as the inevitable outcome of the Russian Revolution. The very title posed the historical question that decades of official Soviet historiography had sought to suppress: was Stalinism the unavoidable development of Bolshevism, or did a Marxist alternative exist?
From this perspective, the conflict between Stalinism and Trotskyism cannot be relegated to a dispute between personalities or rival factions. It concerned the international strategy of the socialist revolution, the relationship between Soviet economic development and world revolution, the nature of socialist democracy and, ultimately, whether the bureaucratic regime would defend or undermine the social foundations established in October 1917.
The new introduction
The 2026 edition’s distinguishing feature is Dmitry Chasovennikov’s introduction. The available evidence here requires an important correction to the assumption that the reissue straightforwardly represents an attempt to revive Basmanov’s political standpoint. The publisher explicitly describes the new introduction as “written from inside the tradition the book sets out to bury” and presents Basmanov’s book as “Moscow’s book-length answer to the post-1968 growth of the Fourth International”. Amazon reproduces substantially the same description, characterising the original as a Soviet attack on Trotsky, the Fourth International and the far left. [amazon.co.uk]
That substantially changes how the republication should be evaluated. On the evidence available from the publisher, the book is being presented not simply as a restored Stalinist polemic for contemporary use but as a historically situated document accompanied by a critical introduction. Nevertheless, one important question remains that the publisher’s promotional description alone cannot settle: how far does Chasovennikov’s introduction pursue the historical implications of the collapse of the Soviet Union, the archival record of Stalinist repression, and the political disputes inside the Fourth International? Without the complete text of the introduction, it would be unjustified to attribute specific answers to him.
The responsible criticism, therefore, is not to pretend that the new editor endorses Basmanov. The more interesting question is what contemporary readers can learn from republishing the book as an historical document.
Why republish it now?
On that basis, there is a legitimate reason to make Contemporary Trotskyism available again. Stalinist anti-Trotskyism deserves historical study. So do the institutions that manufactured it, the political vocabulary they employed and the historical episodes they systematically distorted or suppressed.
Indeed, the publisher’s framing unintentionally makes the book particularly suitable for such a reading. It notes that Basmanov’s polemic followed Ponomarev’s 1971 directive, stresses the political circumstances of its appearance, and explicitly characterises the volume as a response to the revival of revolutionary currents after the late 1960s.
Read critically, therefore, Contemporary Trotskyism can illuminate a significant episode in the ideological history of the Cold War. It shows how the Soviet bureaucracy understood the challenge revolutionary movements posed to its left and how it sought to inoculate Communist Party members and sympathisers against Trotsky’s political legacy. But precisely because of this, the book should never be read in isolation.
Readers seeking to understand these controversies should place Basmanov alongside the principal documents produced by the people he attacks. They should read Trotsky on permanent revolution, the Communist International, the German catastrophe, the Soviet bureaucracy and the founding of the Fourth International. They should investigate the Moscow Trials and the subsequent historical and documentary record. They should examine the conflicts within the Fourth International rather than accepting an omnibus category called “Trotskyism”.Above all, they should compare the rival historical perspectives with what actually happened.
A museum piece, but an instructive one
The most striking feature of Contemporary Trotskyism today is the disappearance of the political world from which it spoke with such institutional confidence. Basmanov wrote from within an enormous state and party apparatus that declared itself the authoritative embodiment of Marxism-Leninism and treated Trotskyism as a defeated deviation relegated to history. Yet the CPSU and the Soviet Union are themselves gone.
The political questions Trotsky fought over have not disappeared with them. The relationship between nationalism and international socialism, the political independence of the working class, the dangers of bureaucracy, the character of revolutionary leadership and the relationship between socialist revolution and democracy remain indispensable questions for anyone attempting to understand the twentieth century or the crisis of contemporary capitalism.
That is the final irony surrounding Basmanov’s resurrection. His book sought to demonstrate that Trotskyism belonged to the past. Half a century later, Basmanov’s polemic returns primarily as a historical artefact from a vanished political apparatus.
The new edition can therefore perform a useful service, provided it is read critically and historically. Approach contemporary Trotskyism not as an authoritative guide to Trotsky or the Fourth International, but as a primary source for understanding how the Soviet bureaucracy represented its Marxist opponents in the last decades of its existence.
And there is an appropriate way to test its claims. Read Basmanov. Then read Trotsky. Read the Left Opposition documents and the political conflicts within the Fourth International. Read the archival scholarship produced after the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Finally, set the conflicting analyses against the history that followed.
That historical comparison transforms this republished polemic from an attack on Trotskyism into an unintended document of the political order against which Trotskyism fought.
Bibliography
Primary text
Basmanov, Mikhail Ivanovich. Contemporary Trotskyism: Its Anti-Revolutionary Nature. Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1972. The digitised original identifies the Institute of Marxism-Leninism of the CC CPSU and confirms the 1972 English printing. [archive.org]
Basmanov, Mikhail Ivanovich. Contemporary Trotskyism: With a New Critical Introduction. Introduction by Chasovennikov. Progress Publishers Library, 2026. The electronic edition is listed as appearing in September 2026. [progresspu…ishers.org], [fnac.com]
Basmanov, Mikhail. Where Are Trotskyites Leading the Youth?. Moscow: Novosti Press Agency Publishing House, 1973. [openlibrary.org]
Trotsky and the Left Opposition
Trotsky, Leon. The Permanent Revolution. 1930.
Trotsky, Leon. The Third International After Lenin. 1928.
Trotsky, Leon. The Revolution Betrayed: What Is the Soviet Union and Where Is It Going? 1936.
Trotsky, Leon. The Transitional Program for Socialist Revolution. 1938.
Trotsky, Leon. In Defence of Marxism. 1942.
Stalinism and the historical struggle over Trotskyism
Deutscher, Isaac. The Prophet Armed: Trotsky, 1879–1921. Oxford University Press, 1954.
Deutscher, Isaac. The Prophet Unarmed: Trotsky, 1921–1929. Oxford University Press, 1959.
Deutscher, Isaac. The Prophet Outcast: Trotsky, 1929–1940. Oxford University Press, 1963.
Rogovin, Vadim. Was There an Alternative? Multi-volume study of the Left Opposition, Stalinism and the political struggles in the Soviet Union.
North, David. The Heritage We Defend: A Contribution to the History of the Fourth International. Detroit: Labour Publications, 1988.
Further reading
Broué, Pierre. Trotsky. Paris: Fayard, 1988.
Serge, Victor. From Lenin to Stalin. 1937.
Sedov, Leon. The Red Book on the Moscow Trials. 1936.
